Orchestrated Death

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  The duty officer stuck his head round the door, registered Slider, and said, ‘Records just phoned, sir. I’ve been ringing your phone – didn’t know you were in here. It’s negative on those fingerprints, sir. No previous.’

  ‘I didn’t think there would be,’ Slider said, his gloom intensifying a millimetre.

  The disembodied face softened: everybody liked Slider.

  ‘I’m just going to make some tea, sir. Would you like a cup?’

  Nicholls came into Slider’s room in the afternoon holding a large brown envelope. Slider looked up in surprise.

  ‘You’re early, aren’t you? Or has my watch stopped?’

  ‘Doing Fergus a favour. He’s tortured with the toothache,’ Nicholls said. He and O’Flaherty were old friends, having gone through police college together. He called O’Flaherty ‘Flatulent Fergus’, and O’Flaherty called him ‘Nutty Nicholls’. They sometimes dropped into a well-polished routine about having been in the trenches together. Nicholls was a ripely handsome Highlander with a surprising range of musical talents. At a police concert in aid of charity he had once brought the house down by singing ‘The Queen of the Night’ aria from The Magic Flute in a true and powerful soprano, hitting the cruel F in alt fair and square on the button. Not so much the school of Bel Canto, he had claimed afterwards, as the school of Can Belto.

  ‘So much tortured,’ Nicholls went on, rolling his Rs impressively, ‘that he forgot to give you these. I found them lying on his desk. I expect you’ve been waiting for them.’

  He held out the envelope and Slider took and opened it.

  ‘Yes, I was wondering where they’d got to,’ he said, drawing out the sheaf of photographs and spreading them on his desk. Nicholls leaned on his fists and whistled soundlessly.

  ‘Is that your corpus? A bit of a stunner, isn’t she? You’d best not let the wife see any of these, or bang goes your overtime for the next ten years.’ He pushed the top ones back with a forefinger. ‘Poor wee lassie,’ he said. ‘No luck ID-ing her yet?’

  ‘We’ve got nothing to go on,’ Slider said. ‘Not so much as a signet ring, or an appendix scar. Nothing but this mark on her neck, and I don’t know that that’s going to get us anywhere.’

  Nicholls picked up one of the close-ups of the neck, and grinned at Slider. ‘Oh Mrs Stein – or may I call you Phyllis?’

  ‘You know something?’

  Nicholls tapped the photograph with a forefinger. ‘You and Freddie Cameron I can understand, but I’m a wee bit surprised young Atherton hasn’t picked up on this.’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t see it at the flat. And we’ve been waiting for the photographs,’ Slider said patiently.

  ‘Tell me, Bill, did you notice anything about her fingers?’

  ‘Nothing in particular. Except that she had very short fingernails. I suppose she bit them.’

  ‘Ah-huh. Nothing of the sort, man. She was a fiddle-player. A vi-o-linist. This is the mark they get from gripping the violin between the neck and the shoulder.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t swear it wasnae a viola,’ Nicholls said gravely. ‘And the fingernails have to be short, you see, for pressing down on the strings.’

  Slider thought. ‘They were short on both hands.’

  ‘I expect she’d want them symmetrical,’ Nicholls said kindly. ‘Well, this gives you a way of tracing her, anyway. Narrows the field. It’s a closed kind of world – everyone knows everyone.’

  ‘I suppose I’d start with the musicians’ union,’ Slider hazarded. Like most people, he had no idea how the musical world was arranged internally. He’d never been to a live symphony concert, though he had a few classical records, and could tell Beethoven from Bach. Just.

  ‘I doubt that’d be much use to you,’ Nicholls said. ‘Not without the name. They don’t have photographs in their central records. No, if I were you, I’d ask around the orchestras.’

  ‘We don’t know that she was a member of an orchestra.’

  ‘No, but if she played the fiddle, it’s likely she was on the classical side of the business rather than the pop. And if she wasn’t a member of an orchestra, she’d still likely be known to someone. As I said, it’s a closed world.’

  ‘Well, it’s a lead, anyway,’ Slider said, getting up with renewed energy and shuffling the photographs together. ‘Thanks, Nutty.’

  Nicholls grinned. ‘N’t’all. Get yon Atherton onto it, I should. I heard a rumour he was havin’ social intercourse with a flute-player at last year’s Proms. That’s why I was surprised he didn’t recognise the mark.’

  ‘If it was a mark on the navel, he’d have spotted it straight off,’ Slider said.

  * * *

  It was a mistake to try to go home at half past five, as anyone more in the habit of doing so than Slider would have known. The A40 – the Western Avenue – was jammed solid with Rovers and BMWs heading out for Gerrard’s Crawse. Slider was locked in his car for an hour with a disc jockey called Chas or Mike or Dave – they always seemed to have names like the bark of a dog – who burbled on about a major tailback on the A40 due to roadworks at Perivale. So he was further hindered in his desire to forget his work for a while by finding himself stationary for a long period on the section of the road which ran beside the White City Estate.

  Sometime this afternoon Freddie Cameron would have done the post. Slider had been to one or two out of interest, in order to know what happened, and he had not wished to attend this one. It was a particularly human horror, this minute and dispassionate mutilation of a dead body. No other species practised it on its own kind. He felt inexplicably unnerved at the thought. For some reason this particular young woman refused to take on the status of a corpse but remained a person in his mind, her white body floating there like the memory of someone he had known. She was in the back of his head, like the horrors seen out of the corner of the eye in childhood: like the man with no face behind the bedroom door after Mum had put the light out. He knew he mustn’t look at it, or it would get him; and yet the half-admitted shape called the eye irresistibly.

  He tried to concentrate on the radio programme. A listener had just called in, apparently – to judge by the background noise – from some place a long way off that was suffering from a hailstorm, or possibly an earthquake. A distorted voice said, ‘Hullo Dive, this is Eric from Hendon. I am a first-time caller. I jussliketsay, I lissnayour programme every day, iss reelly grite.’ Slider remembered being told that soundwaves never die, simply stream off into space for ever and ever. What would they make of that, out on Alpha Centauri Beta?

  He was going home early in the hope of scoring some Brownie points after the storms of the last few days. It struck him as a dismal sort of reason for going home, and he thought enviously of Atherton heading back to his bijou little cottage, a few delectable things to eat, and a stimulating evening with a new young woman to be conquered. Not that Slider wanted stimulation or a new young woman – he was too tired these days for the thought of illicit sex to do other than appal him; but peace and comfort would have been nice to look forward to.

  But the house, which he hated, was Irene’s, decorated and furnished to her requirements, not his. Wasn’t it the same for all married men? Probably. Probably. All the same, the three-piece suite seemed to have been designed for looking at, not sitting on. All the furniture was like that: it rejected human advances like a chilly woman. It was like living in one of those display houses at the Ideal Home Exhibition.

  And Irene cooked like someone meting out punishment. No, that wasn’t strictly fair. The food was probably perfectly wholesome and well-balanced nutritionally, but it never seemed to taste of anything. It was joyless food, imbued with the salt water of tears. The subconscious knowledge that she hated cooking would have made him feel guilty about evincing any pleasure in eating it, even if there had been any.

  When they were first married, Slider had done a lot of the cooking in their little bedsit in Holland Park. He like
d trying out new dishes, and they had often laughed together over the results. He examined the memory doubtfully. It didn’t seem possible that the Irene he was going home to was the same Irene who had sat cross-legged on the floor and eaten chilli con carne out of a pot with a tablespoon. She didn’t like him to cook now – she thought it was unmanly. In fact, she didn’t like him going into the kitchen at all. If he so much as made a cup of tea, she followed him round with a J cloth and a tight-lipped expression, wiping up imaginary Spillings.

  When he got home at last, it was all effort wasted, because Irene was not there. She had gone out to play bridge with the Harpers and Ernie Newman, which, had he thought hard enough, he should have known, because she had told him last week about it. Slider had said sooner her than him, and she’d asked why in a dangerous sort of way, and he’d said because Newman was an intolerable, stuffed-shirted, patronising, constipated prick. Irene primmed her lips and said there was no need for him to bring bowels into it, he wasn’t talking to one of his low Met friends now, and if he spent less time with them and more with decent people he’d be able to hold a civilised conversation once in a while.

  Then they had had a row, which ended with Irene complaining that they never went anywhere together any more, and that was more or less true, not only because of his job, but because they no longer liked doing the same kind of things. He liked eating out, which she thought was just a waste of money. And she liked playing bridge, for God ’s sake!

  Actually, he was pretty sure she didn’t like bridge, that she had only learned it as the entrée to the sort of society to which she thought they ought to belong. The Commissioner and his wife played bridge. He didn’t say that to her of course, when she badgered him to learn. He just said he didn’t like card games and she said he didn’t like anything, and he had found that hard to refute just for the moment. His concerns seemed to have been whittled down to work, and slumping in front of the telly for ten minutes before passing out. It was years since he had stayed awake all the way through a film. He was becoming a boring old fart.

  Of course, that wasn’t congenital. He had lots of interests really: good food and wine and vintage cars and gardening and walking in the country and visiting old houses – architecture had always been a passion of his, and he used to sketch rather well in a painstaking way – but there just didn’t seem to be room in his life any more. Not time, somehow, but room, as if his wife and his children and his mortgage and his job swelled like wet rice year by year – bland, damp and weighty – and squeezed everything else out of him.

  No Brownie points tonight, then. No peace either – the living-room was occupied by the babysitter, who was watching a gameshow on television. A ten-second glance at the screen suggested that the rules of the game comprised the contestants having to guess which of the Christian names on the illuminated board was their own in order to win a microwave oven or a cut-glass decanter and glasses. The applause following a right answer was as impassioned as an ovation for a Nobel-prize winner.

  The babysitter was fifteen and, for some reason Slider had never discovered, her name was Chantal. Slider regarded her as marginally less competent to deal with an emergency than a goldfish, and this was not only because, short of actual self-mutilation, she had done everything possible to make herself appear as ugly and degenerate as possible. Her clothes hung sadly on her in uneven layers of conflictingly ugly colours, her shoes looked like surgical boots, and her hair was died coke-black, while the roots were growing out blonde: a mind-numbing reversal of the normal order of things which made Slider feel as if he were seeing in negative.

  To add to this, her eyelids were painted red and her fingernails black, she chewed constantly like a ruminant, and she wore both earrings in the same ear, though Slider assumed that this was fashion and not absent-mindedness. She was actually quite harmless, apart from her villainous appearance, and her parents were decent, pleasant people with a comfortable income.

  She looked up at him now with the intensely unreliable expression of an Old English sheepdog.

  ‘Oh, hullo, Mr Slider. I wasn’t expecting you,’ she said, and a surprising hot blush ran up from under her collar. She fingered her Phurnacite hair nervously. She was in fact desperately in love with him, though Slider hadn’t twigged it. He had replaced Dennis Waterman in her heart the instant she discovered that Dennis Waterman was married to Rula Lenska. ‘Shall I turn this off?’

  ‘No, it’s all right. I won’t disturb you. Where are the children?’

  ‘Matthew’s round his friend Simon’s, and Kate’s in her room reading.’ They eyed each other for a moment, trapped by politeness. ‘Shall I fix you a drink?’ Chantal asked suddenly. It was like a scene from Dynasty. Slider glanced around nervously for the television cameras.

  ‘Oh – er – no, thanks. You watch your programme. Don’t mind me. I’ve got things to do.’

  He backed out into the hall and closed the door. Fix him a drink, indeed! He looked round, wondering what to do next. No comfort, he thought. He really hadn’t anything to do. He was so unused to having time on his hands that he felt hobbled by it. He decided to go upstairs and see Kate, who hadn’t been awake when he left that morning, and whom he hardly ever saw at night because she usually went to bed before he got home. The door of her room was closed, and through it he heard the muted tones of what must surely be the same radio programme.

  ‘Hullo Mike. This is Sharon from Tooting. I jussliketersay, I lissnayour programme all the time, iss reelly grite …’

  Or perhaps there was only ever one, an endless loop of tape run by a computer from a basement somewhere behind Ludgate Circus.

  He stopped on the dim landing, and suddenly the dead girl was there with him, ambushing him from the back of his mind: the childlike fall of her hair and the curve of her cheek, the innocence of her nakedness. He put his fingers to his temples and pressed and drew his breath long and hard. He felt on the brink of some unknown crisis; he felt suddenly out of control.

  Kate must have heard something – she called out ‘Is that you Daddy?’ from inside her room. Slider let out his breath shudderingly, drew another more normal. He reached for the door handle.

  ‘Hullo, my sweetheart,’ he said cheerfully, going in.

  CHAPTER 3

  Drowsy Syrups

  It was an old-fashioned morgue, cold and high-ceilinged, with marble floors that echoed hollowly when you walked across them, and a sink in the corner with a tap that dripped. There was a strong smell of disinfectant and formalin, which did not quite mask a different smell underneath – warmer, sweetish and dirty.

  Cameron, fresh from the path unit at one of the newer hospitals, contrasted this chilly old tomb with the low-ceilinged, strip-lighted, air-conditioned, rubber-tile-floored place he had just left. He felt a vague fondness, all the same, for the old morgues like this which were fast disappearing. Not only had he done his training in such places, but the architecture reminded him cosily of his primary school in Edinburgh. All the same, he decided to leave his waistcoat on.

  His dapper form enveloped in protective apron and gloves, he bent forward over the pale cadaver on the herringbone-gullied table, his breath just faintly visible on the cold air as, whistling, he made the first sweeping incision from the point of the chin to the top of the pubic bone.

  ‘Right then, here we go,’ he said, reaching under the table with his foot for the pedal which turned on the audio recorder. Out of sheer force of habit he reached up and tapped the microphone with a knuckle to see if it was working, and it clunked hollowly. The assistant watched him phlegmatically. He had tested the machinery himself as a matter of course, as he always did, as Cameron knew he always did; but Cameron had no faith in machines. He had done his training in the days of handwritten notes, and even then he had known fountain pens to go wrong.

  Now, like a cheerful gardener pruning roses, Cameron snipped through the cartilages which joined the ribs, freed them from the breastbone, separated the breastbone from the c
ollarbones, and then with the economical force of long practice, opened out the two sides of the chest like cabinet doors. Inside, neatly disposed in their ordained order, were the internal organs, displayed like an anatomical drawing in a medical textbook before his enquiring eyes.

  Slider was not present. Cameron had phoned him earlier to say that he would not be posting the girl until six-thirty, in case he wanted to come, but Slider had refused. Cameron thought his old friend sounded distinctly odd. He hoped old Bill wasn’t going to crack up. Many a good man had gone that way: Cameron had seen it in the army as well as in the force, time and time again, and it was always the quiet, conscientious ones you had to watch. When a man had worry at work and worry at home – well, pressure started to build up. And poor old Bill’s Madam was not exactly the Pal of the Period.

  The words male menopause floated through his mind and he dismissed them irritably. He disliked jargon, particularly inaccurate jargon. When a man of forty-odd started fancying young girls, it was either because things were not right at home, or he was trying to prove something to himself – in either case, it was nothing to do with hormones. Not that Bill was chasing skirts, of course – he simply wasn’t that sort – but it came to the same thing. He was jumpy, distinctly jumpy.

  ‘I’d like to come, Freddie, but I’ve got a heap of reports I’ve been putting off,’ Slider had said. ‘It’s quiet now, and I daren’t put them off again.’ Now this was transparently an excuse. Cameron knew how much there was to do when a division handled a murder case – the Incident Room to be set up, thousands of statements to go over – no need to go dragging in reports. Then Slider had given a nervous laugh and added unnecessarily, ‘You know what paperwork is.’ When a close friend starts talking to you like an idiot, Cameron considered, you knew there was something seriously on his mind.

  Still whistling, and wielding his large knife with a flourish, more the jolly family butcher now than the cheerful gardener, he removed the internal organs in turn, weighed, sliced and examined them, and took sections for analysis, which the assistant sealed in sterile jars and labelled while Cameron watched sternly. He had a natural horror of unlabelled specimens. When the body was completely eviscerated, he made a lateral cut across the scalp from ear to ear, freed the tissues from the bone, and drew the front half of the scalp down over the face like a mask, and the rear half down over the neck like a coalman’s flap. Then with an electric bone-saw he cut through the cranium and lifted the top off the skull, much as he had taken the top off his boiled egg that morning, and with very little more effort. With a little more cutting and snipping, he was able to slide his hands in under the brain and lift it out whole. He laid it on the slab and sliced it like a rather pallid country loaf.